Blood: Fountaining from my Gums in Joy
May 10, 2004
When I was a kid, I had a wire installed behind my front teeth to straighten them up a little. After leading a happy, dentally oblivious life for the past 10 years; the wire snapped behind my front teeth last week.
Believing this was simply a piece of mangled meat caught behind in my wire - I used to get food stuck in it quite a bit - I tried for the best part of an afternoon to pick it out with my tongue. That was until my tongue was the mangled piece of meat, and I got Adam (ie my man-whore) to take a peek inside my gob with a flashlight. This was when I discovered that this was no piece of food but a snapped wire.
So off to the dentist I trotted. I’ve always been apprehensive about dentists ramming their fingers into my mouth - it takes a fair bit of effort to restrain myself from biting them. Luckily, on this occasion, I had a nice lady-dentist with petite lady-fingers. This calmed me down quite a bit initially.
That was until she picked up a mammoth dentist drill, held it casually in one hand as if she was posing for a Sportsgirl catalogue, then informed me in a manner completely at odds with the potential carnage to come: “I have to warn you, there is a small possibility that your teeth may actually cave in during this process.”
THIS IS THE TERMINOLOGY SHE USED.
Now, imagine my eyeballs frantically buzzing around, viciously scanning the room as I’m pinned down in this dentist chair, trying to find qualifications of any sort on the wall. Hell, I’d have settled for a dental certificate she made herself in Microsoft Publisher with some ridiculously inappropriate clip art. But nay! No qualifications to be found. It was a very tense appointment, let me tell you.
I actually had to return to the dentist today to finish everything off, and she cleaned out my teeth at the end of the appointment. But once again, she filled me with terror before she got to work, this time by uttering: “I do have to warn you, there will be a lot of blood during this process.”
At first, I dismissed this as the hilarious brand of humour dentists are famous for. Then I noticed gobs and CHUNKS of blood spattering the sunnies she’d given me only moments before.
When I arrived home earlier this evening, I was too worried to look in the mirror, so I asked Adam what he thought. As I bared my teeth, his words were: “Well, your gums look a bit black and blue”. I don’t want to look like I have some tropical yeast infection of the mouth! I just wanted a wire-free mouth!
I should freakin’ report the lady-dentist. Except she’s booked me back in again for cavity fillings. I can’t escape the woman, and she scares me so.
